"Fiction is empathy technology," was the sound the target and the arrow made when conjoined at the bulls-eye by another incisive explanatory summation"Fiction is empathy technology," was the sound the target and the arrow made when conjoined at the bulls-eye by another incisive explanatory summation in a long and winding queue of incisive explanatory summations of the multidisciplinary-hat-donning writer and public intellectual, Steven Pinker, at a fairly recent panel discussion/debate held on the subject of morality as it relates to the analytic and creative reach and potencies of the methods and accumulated knowledge of the sciences. This phrase leapt out of the placid murmur of my laptop while I was making some vain attempt to fall asleep a few months ago. I immediately—without a single jump cut of hesitation—preserved it with unquestioning keystrokes. I felt it was a beautifully compact coordinate and that it was magnetically in-want of my symbiotic yearning and yielding, secretly in-command, unknown but felt as a palpable ache beneath the stratum of the clown-sad artifice, in a language older than sensation. An ache with a heartbeat. And a mouth sealed in resignation by the pitiless omnidirectionality of it all—of all the canted arrows R. Feynman slings into the mouths of babes. The increasingly less muffled thud of the heart, and I, stricken with both the need for and terror of hidden motives that may be finning about in the heart of the heart of the heart of anything, an addition to the anxious fluctuations of the asymmetrical piecemeal assemblage meant to give a sense of self-possession, cutely euphemized as a conscious individual human being—ah, behold the insignia of terror and triumph. Attempts to navigate the great outdoors and the accursed oblong shell housing the illusory continuity commonly euphemized as ____________. O, the tragicomic slapdash cartography of being a feeling, thinking thing! Woe!

"Fiction is empathy technology" amasses as a singularity, hyper-densely atremble with illuminative energies—from which emerge many profoundly morally consequential and intellectually contributive ideas about the nature of and the highest virtues of art generally, and literary fiction more specifically, which possibly—arguably—holds a particularly unique and prized position among the arts and sciences in its intractable entetherment to cultivating empathy and compassion, free of the cynical reflex.

(GIS: fiction is empathy technology)

When applied to my readerly experience with the thoroughly satiating and inspiring novel 10:01, this connective tissue between art and the strained attempts to see the world through someone else's eyes—to be broken down and rebuilt by compassion—in the shifting climes of context, this quaking epicenter of illumination in potentia then detonates within—erumpent and joyful—the seduction of the prismatic bloom and the realignments of everything fleeing everything, fanning out with a bone-rattling force and its echo-chamber-shattering reverberations, louder than the deepest roaring at the heart of the sun, straining beyond the event horizons of sense perception and the abstracta of theory vainly imagined to be purified of experience, and into the unutterably lonely, itinerate, radial swells of the sea of immeasurability.

Pinker’s quote summarizes the deep and probable evolutionary and motivational origins of fictional narratives and their continual ability to teach us not only the importance of empathy but how to carry it out to actual practice, and to heightened levels of activation and attentional commitment that demand more than the knee-greets-mallet reflexes of Pavlovian instinct, and/or the mere dutiful obedience to social conventions and the inherently sullied good intentions and/or the manipulative pathologies of the iron fists of unprincipled coercion.

Empathy is a teachable skill, and one that is pliable and subject to growth and decay, and as such can be honed, intentionally sculpted, improved upon in myriad ways, and then conversely it can be neglected and atrophied and debased or altogether obliterated by the terrifying ravages of sociopathy, a condition which has a still largely ungrasped nature animating it and therefore eludes the possible preventative measures that could be used to sidestep the uncountable scores of human cruelty and suffering, laid out by the fractured millisecond upon its bloodied ledger. Luckily, the rapid advancements in the modern sciences of the mind are making undeniable progress through meticulous multi-disciplinary study, sorting and sifting through the dauntingly elaborate and nebulous constellations of cause and effect in order to zero in on some truly salient factors that give rise to those of us who cannot feel the minds of others. So perhaps there are seedlings of hope to be found scattered throughout the unresponsive stretches of infertile earth, and an array of both willfully concerted efforts and the beautifully aligned, dumb luck accidents of the bilateral anophthalmia of chaos that's intrinsically woven into the order of things.

This first encounter with Lance Olsen’s writing elicited an unqualified demolition of ye old proverbial floodgates and the unfettering of surges that overwhelmed my shores with reinvigorated thoughts and feelings about the abilities of art to be so much more than mere novelty, or intoxicating entertainment, or the pathetic inward collapse of the full embrace of the bedpost notches of fashionable consumption—and this sense of excavation and re-engagement and even optimistic inspiration all frankly felt and feels life changing to me. Olsen's empathy technology is extremely advanced, and expertly fashioned and maintained in this truly unique and cardiac-resuscitating collection of human experiences. _____________________________________________________

I urge everyone who will read this review to read this book. I was going to write a much more forthright, much less insanely purpled-prose style and unrevealing review (if you could see my wild notes you'd have your proof of this), but realized that I would have just ended up summarizing the entire thing in a much too revealing way. So just take my word/s for it.

And thank you thank you thank you to Jasmine for alerting me to this book and author. This is one of those testimonials that reminds me that Goodreads is something I'll forever be in debt to for its sheer usefulness in giving me access to the existence of books I probably would not have access to otherwise._____________________________________________________

Addendum: I will try to (continue to) more straightforwardly articulate things about the book in the comments section....more

I read this book in June of 2011 and recently thought about it again when I stumbled upon an interview the author'd conducted with some Nietzsche apprI read this book in June of 2011 and recently thought about it again when I stumbled upon an interview the author'd conducted with some Nietzsche appreciation society or somesuch. I liked what he had to say about the remaining relevance of the literary fiction form, as it jibes with my own opinions and those of others I respect who've been asked to justify the medium they've committed themselves to work within:

"For the last fifty years or so, The Novel’s demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can’t in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language—especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end?"

This book attempts to inhabit the mind of the iconic bristly-lipped German philosopher in his final day of genuine madness. If the language weren't so beautiful it could've been a disaster, and at moments in veered dangerously close to being 'a bit much' but my now distant-seeming memory of it remains largely favorable, despite not enjoying it as much as the first Oslen book that I read, and read right before picking up this cringe-inducingly-titled novel. Like 10:01, it defied my cynical skepticism and ended up being well-worth the currency of my time, attention and money. Much of it is told through flashbacks and details the often mythologized and heavily scrutinized figure with both kind and unkind depictions. Historical accuracy seems a bit besides the point in a novel like this, but it still managed to feel real enough while my eyes were stuck in its pages.

For those who don't know, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche went into a state of insanity for the final ten years of his life. In the early stages he was signing his bizarre letters as "Dionysus" or "The Crucified" and so forth, saying stranger more nonsensical things than he ever published as philosophy while his faculties were intact--this all being immediately after a now famous story about his initial trip to the sanitarium being spurred by him collapsing and weeping while clutching a horse that was being beaten and whipped in the street. The majority of these ten years were spent in bed-ridden catatonic silence while his sister handled his estate and manipulated his writings to serve her own dubious purposes, which would not be corrected until Walter Kaufmann came along to translate his works into English in the 1950's and discovered her omissions and additions. In any case, Olsen attempts to describe the point of view of someone with a genuine degenerative brain disorder (consensus is that syphilis was rotting his brain away for many years) who's on their deathbed. This person just so happens to be a now famous German philosopher with more than a few interesting biographies floating around.

A central narrative arc via flashbacks involves Nietzsche's disastrous attempts at finding lasting romance with Lou Salome, a Strong Independent Woman who snared his affections and also left him standing in the cold with a wedding ring in his hand. It also touches on Nietzsche's father being a Lutheran minister and dying when he was a young boy, both patriarchal details making for great psychoanalytic fodder for scholars to wax theoretical about over the decades, considering the legacy of the philosopher's anti-Christian, God-slaying, Life-On-Earth-embracing canon.

I suspect that only those with some interest in Nietzsche at some point in their lives will possibly find this book worthwhile. Even as someone who realized that Nietzsche wasn't as great on the whole as I once thought him to be, I found something valuable in this and I think purely on the human level of trying to embody the consciousness of someone else, which Olsen's kick-off quote describes as being The Novel's true wheelhouse, and despite my previously acquired knowledge and pretty serious appreciation of the mustachioed man's writing and bio.

Olsen has a real talent with language that's on display here and that alone made it worth the price of admission for me....more

Bill Callahan made his name by carving out pathways through the underbrush of the music world with a series of releases that began (c. 1990) with a (tBill Callahan made his name by carving out pathways through the underbrush of the music world with a series of releases that began (c. 1990) with a (thankfully) brief period of atonal, unfriendly noise. This quickly grew into a long stretch of mostly dour but strangely beautiful and compelling albums that were usually very minimalistic, unpolished and centered around nothing but his vibrating vocal chords and the simple labor of a guitar or two, and maybe a few eerie notes wrought from a piano. This further matured into recordings with studio musicians and attempts to wipe away more of the gloom than usually was wiped away, with the crept-in inclusions of both brighter chord progressions and lyrical content. Throughout the majority of his career he hovered beneath the major radar seeking devices with the moniker Smog—that is until until 2007 when, instead, his legal name began to materialize as the representative of his music, perhaps as a signal of toxic clouds beginning to dissipate.

[See: Message Thirteen below for e.g.'s of music.]

Letters to Emma Bowlcut is Bill's first attempt to let the words alone do the talking. He ends up with a fairly impressive debut. It doesn't strive to be anything grand or critically revered. It has the rare weightlessness of humility, or did while held in my hands. It's just a quiet and subtly strange novella released by his record label without fanfare or syncophantic blurbs tattooed across its outerlayer.

This is the story of an unnamed man as told through a series of letters that he composes to a woman he'd met at a party. Much detail is left to the imagination throughout the book, but this creates further intrigue and causes the slim volume to radiate a restrained and haunting oddness. There's also mention of something called The Vortex, which the nameless protagonist makes equally undetailed mention of. As far as one can tell, this could be an actual physical structure that he studies scientifically (as is implied, but in a pretty vague and oblique manner) and/or could be a metaphor for some sort of emotional wound or mental disturbance. In either case, the prose that swirls around these things and the rest of the descriptions of a seemingly rather alone character is uniquely poetic while largely remaining plainspoken at the same time.

Other details include the character's trips to a local gym to view boxing matches in a distant and fragile way—like a depressed anthropologist rather than a genuine fan—and descriptions of visiting his grandmother in a nursing home—the final one involves drinking too much red wine and challenging his elders to bouts of arm-wrestling. For the most part each letter is a series of unpretentious musings about deceivingly simple things, renditions of his daily habits, and curiosities about the woman he's writing to. Again, all told through very brief letters written to a person who is, as far as one can tell, for the most part, a stranger to him.

Callahan's created an oddly compelling tale here, littered with tiny flares of plainspoken insight into loneliness and the attempts to quell it. It can easily be read in a single brief sitting—and I now think he's capable of pulling something off later that might take a little more effort....more

Throughout my reading, this book transformed within my perceptual apparatus from a darkly hilarious (and loosely historical) farce to a viscerally felThroughout my reading, this book transformed within my perceptual apparatus from a darkly hilarious (and loosely historical) farce to a viscerally felt chunk of despair-engaged-with-directly-as-despair rather than despair-with-silver-(in-between-the)-linings. By about the halfway point I shifted from mainly chuckling and appreciating Sharpe's inventive and highly synesthesiac prose into grimly and silently accepting that there's ultimately nothing truly redeeming about anything, ever. That the world is a meaningless—albeit interestingly interconnected—whorl of chaos and destruction and pain, and while beautiful and gratifying to be within at various intervals, is mostly directed toward a great big pile of entropic decay and a resounding So What pushed out through cosmic collapsing lungs and a throaty void. The progress of civilization—a mere shell game of rearranged variables of violence and greed and selfishness. Artistic expression—vanity and petty distraction. Political revolution—same shit, different shovel. Romantic relationships—a mere tangle of limbs and fluids and deceit spiraling towards disappointment and gut-wrenching anxiety and depression. Bleak, stark, horrible shit. The types of descriptions rightly laughed off as terminally one-sided and gothy and self-pitying by those not caught in the grip of Seriously Bad Thoughts at the moment, but the types of descriptions that nonetheless bluntly and accurately describe the monolithic crushing feelings that can be and are undeniably felt by creatures boxed in by and are themselves summations of flesh 'n' bone—feelings which have no room or basic constitution for things like nuance and complexity and perspectival shifts allowing one to See Tomorrow As a New Day or silver linings as non-delusional or non-trivial. To feel psychic pain so tremendous and claustrophobic and inexorable that words fail to bring it to a truly living and radiant description perhaps precisely because it's, by definition, the kind of thing words fail to alleviate. The most condensed one-liner of a description of such a mental state that even gets close for me comes (of course) from a guy whose name begins with 'Dav' and ends with 'allace', which is described as basically a inescapably intense feeling that every cell, molecule, atom and subatomic particle that composes the duly plagued person feels utterly, pinnacle-y nauseous, yet paralytically unable to vomit and attain cathartic amelioration.

"To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collar bone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, if you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e.coli and lactobacilli in you, too, the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere, in everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom, swollen and throbbing, off color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases. everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place, bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very . . . very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one."

This book is hilarious, though. And emotionally poignant (even its less than picturesque central love story). But also unrelentingly dark in many ways. Characters are often roiling in a cornucopia of disease and physical pain and all too regularly live amidst extreme violence and uncertainty about futures both immediate and less so. Almost all of the sex is violent and encased in dirt and mucus and feral, subhuman grunts and cerebellum-piercing yelps and excretions of purely profane physical relief that all mainly manage to avoid anything to do with such quaint and luxuriant ideas as 'love' and 'affection'.

But again, it's a surrealistic laugh riot.

And this is a laugh riot ("Remember that one bares their teeth while laughing") in which a (not-too-far-off-in-all-probability) futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopian conceit collides in a biting (as in literally, with teeth) and erotically undulating embrace with the tropes of 17th century pioneering adventure tales, replete with arrow-slinging and tomahawk-wielding Natives and counterpoints of dusty, grizzled, raggedly-bearded Caucasian 'settlers' with newfangled machines, spanning the technological gauntlet from high-powered autobus-mounted firearms to touch screen sensitive pixelations capable of transmitting and receiving both battle plans and love notes. Of course in this dirt-caked fuck-fest of a collision the conceit and tropes are skewed, rearranged, gorgeously and uniquely re-envisioned and generally flipped on their disease-ridden asses in order to make for an emotionally engaging and cerebrally incisive 300+ p. slice of novelistic experience. Characters live in uber-simplistic/-filthy tents while using mobile texting devices. They’ll talk about trailing (oft-radiation-infused) animals on the hunt while making reference to the Chrysler building (which is a collapsed column of ash along with most of NYC and its interlocking and tribally warring boroughs). They cook up corn gruel on greasy campfires while sitting right outside of their Mad Max style autobus. So yes, certain narrative conventions collide and shift about throughout the book, but in a very organic, unobstrusive, non-clever-for-clever's-sake way. Most of the story is written in various first person POVs which range from the brute and immediate thoughts of a person's encounters with sex and/or violence scrawled in raw onomatopoeia to the extended chin-rubbing, starry-eyed musings of a philosopher-poet (puppeteered by a self-conscious enough author to make them both sincere and deep-minded without becoming annoyingly self-important, in fact, they're often hilarious, subtle parodies of self-important deep-mindedness).

And whatever the tone or objects/subjects of depiction, Sharpe's overall way with words always remains fresh and vivid and fascinating to me. One such e.g. is his description of the basic human experience of living as a "heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made out of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth." Another would be his description of the titular Jamestown as "this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step [and] bespoke the yearning bullshit of men's souls." Or how to look up at the sky during a clear day is to be "blinded by the nothing that hung between the sun and their eyes." And on and on these little gems trail through the bombed out cavities and the condensed ash plains of paper and ink.

A final, extra-textual, somewhat thematically-relevant observation about this reading and reviewing exercise is that there's something to the notion that one can overload themselves with blunt, hyperbolic descriptions of certain states in order to alleviate those very states. I’ve thought about this before. When I reach foul and desperate enough moods in which altering them with things that traditionally bring about cheer and sunshine (or at least neutral distraction) simply compounds the scope and intensity of the foulness because the fear and frustration brought about by witnessing these traditional means fail in spectacularly unnerving ways—when this happens I’ve noticed that encountering egregiously dark materials{1} with enough gusto can eventually begin to untangle the cognitive/connotive knot in one's mind, if not transform and malleate the whole mess into an altogether new light. Sharpe does this at various points within his bleak and phantasmagorial comedy, and while the Reading Me didn’t really appreciate the benefits fully (to say the least), the Reviewing Me now thanks him for it, despite the fact that the only thing that really counts in life is the Heat Death of the Universe.____________________________________________

{1} Shortlist E.g.: the tremendously bleak, albeit gorgeous, aphorisms of Emil Cioran, or the woe-is-me mania of Fernando Pessoa, or the crushing melancholy of a song by Mark Linkous—or any number of minor-chord-anchored, tear-duct-tingling tracks by any number of musicians—etc, etc, etc, etc....more

A wise man once said, "Hell yeah, motherfucker. You're gonna love this." Such wisdom remains etched as it first was at the head of the communication bA wise man once said, "Hell yeah, motherfucker. You're gonna love this." Such wisdom remains etched as it first was at the head of the communication boxes below. Verily, I say unto you, this language vessel rises above the din of most experimental or surreal endeavors. It is surely not the only such book concerned with the nature of language and meaning and reality, or assembled with slyly strung together and unrelenting and astounding oddness, but it does more in the service of agitating the reader's thoughts in those directions in a single chapter than many such books do in their entirety, or that their authorial directors manage to in a prolific lifespan of pursuing the sublime but misplacing their footprints into the merely ridiculous. As another wise man of sorts also once said "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous." My judgment thermometer says that Ben Marcus maintains his footing on the better half of this righteous line cut through the sand.

One could get the feeling from reading his work that the author is not of this world. Even a glance at his less than typical promotional photo might aid in furthering the suspicion—with the hairless cranium, utterly emotionless mouth, and somewhat haunting stare. The point of view found within these thinly-wrought gutted-tree bits is often comparable to what a visitor from an indescribably foreign world might see; or perhaps how another terrestrial species, if given the ability and/or desire to commune with our grammar and vocabularly, might describe what takes place amongst we humans; and to absorb this POV with one's seeing and thinking cloth is alternately delightful, frightening and forcefully thought-provoking.

Be forewarned, my friends, if your idea of too weird and/or too difficult and/or too unrealistic is to be exemplified by e.g. the tones emitted from Headmaster DeLillo's typewriter or the heavily populated and wending sentence trails of Brother Foster Wallace, you should probably continue running away from the Marcus monographs with mouths twisted into horrified geometries—and this will now be a conscious fleeing, instead of the one in the silent places of yourself, as before. This is not an indictment of any kind, just a plain statement of caution to my fellow travelers who also feel their way about the Earth with the sensory guidance of ink and paper.

The opening chapter would make for the most clever and hilarious Goodreads review of this book. It is a letter that contains the basic sentiment and actual sentence:

"Forget Ben Marcus and his world of lies."

And is signed:

Your father,Michael Marcus

"Behold the Strange Miracle and Power of the Word!" is one of the louder things this book would bellow, were it willing and able. If this book does not squeeze thunderous and profound thoughts about language from your pulp, you are reading it incorrectly. Two well-worn U.S. idioms that should be kept in a mildly ventilated mason jar next to you as you read Notable American Women:

"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me." & "Fill in the Blank is beyond words."

The reader was a student in the book's classroom of Perspectivism 101. The reader was assaulted with words that grew into ideas. Root-taking was a euphoric shiver followed by growing pains, followed by serene quiet in the darkened cave where each syllable was a beautiful droplet, each sweet sound held in sustained echo. The reader journeyed to heights and depths, erased meanings and forged new ones. The reader occasionally was spanked by confusion sticks, but loved by the new worlds exposed through the teacher's arsonistic crimes of passion committed against the curtains and walls that would seek to stand in the way of such love.

There are passages to be discovered that appear to have be constructed by a process of such restraint and craftsmenship that it is as if each sentence popped into the one-skulled House of Marcus, one at a time, fully formed ex nihilo, and was carefully extracted with a slow and gentle pinch and delicately set into place upon the page with a silent, pillowed thud. This is in contrast to other great authors of similar persuasion that seem to be in a perpetual wrestling match with a fire hose's powerful spray of thoughts and words, who trim their efforts with artful precision after the open spout's already done its business. The delete key seems eerily absent from the measured and well-paced inscriptions of this strangest of strange creations that continues to elude my own lingual abominations.

Were this reviewer allowed to coin new terms for prose styles, much of this book and a previous Marcus effort (The Age of Wire and String) might be conjoined to the hips or hands of such academic philosophical nomenclature as Eliminative Materialism or Physicalist prose. Wide fields of sentences eschew the function of metaphor and analogy while maintaining the skeletal structure of those things, consequently creating a new physics, a new logic concerning how objects and forces and thoughts stand in relation to one another. There are ripe new items on its vines like listening cloths, behavior smoke, learning ponds, forgetting water, et cetera. A truly newborn ontology awaits thee.

There is an English word, visceral, that gets tossed about when discussing and describing the effects of words; this book contains descriptions so visceral that they laugh at such a word while the letters "v", "i" and "s" hang helplessly from its bloodied maw. The words strange, disturbing, hilarious, weird, brilliant, dark, unique, unnerving, metafiction and even book also scatter in the presence of this series of diverse vignettes tied together by a tale of a cult in Ohio that seeks to trim down the use of language and physical motion until words and movement are annihilated completely.

Language as a weapon, a virulent strain; human activity and mere existence as a mass murderer of air and space; fiction as a lie beyond redemption, and the written word as its ultimate accomplice.

Caris and I go way back. Not so much in time, but more so in space. If we think of every relevant and conceivable detail on every conceivable scale (fCaris and I go way back. Not so much in time, but more so in space. If we think of every relevant and conceivable detail on every conceivable scale (from the geographic to the bodily to the subatomic) directly related to the act of exchanging discrete units of information—from brain to computer to computer to brain—traveling between our respective hubs in Illinois and Arizona, well, we've covered an immense and ongoing totality of 'cross country miles.

What has this exercise in "whoa, dude"-style facts of the matter resulted in at the emergent level of "ideas" and "relationships"? Well, for one thing I can't help but think of Jack Kerouac when I think of Caris. It's an unwilled mental association among billions, the types of things that more or less constitute the entirety of my mind, or so it seems during a moment of less deterministic feeling self-reflection. As David Foster Wallace is listed as my numero uno "Favorite Author[s]" on my Goodreads driver’s license, Monsieur Kerouac is listed the same way upon Caris's ID. (It bears mentioning that Caris is far, far, far, far less intrusive with his love for his favorite author than I am.)

Also, Kerouac was the only subject we ever discussed (and discussed very briefly) before our E-Friendship 2.0 was enacted somewhat recently. I feel bad for the shitty way that I ripped upon my friend's favorite author and even worse about the snotty hyper-generalizations I made about said author's non-teenage fans. Suffice to say that I am no longer moved by Kerouac the way I once was. But I also know that I can react to things that no longer move me like they once did with a dauntingly complex mess of emotions and misdirected projections (and other waxing Freudian-esque terms) that occasionally whorl into something spiteful and unthinkingly hasty, which can only be remedied post hoc.* I link to that shabby and deeply-in-need-of-caveats-and-revision "review" not out of vote whore impulses but rather as a way to footnote this basic point and move on to what I really want to talk about which is how I loved this book and view it as a highly welcomed influx of new raw material to help further solidify the aforementioned bridge of information microscopically whirring and pulsing between the approximations of selves called Caris and Josh. If it were a train route it might be called the Budding Bromance Express. _____________________________________________________

*Again with the reflexes. I can't keep this rising vomit of analysis down. How to breezily summarize? I think I feel my mortality and the entropic decaying nature of things viscerally and quite often. There are reminders of it everywhere. One place I've found it is in the hall of mirrors reflections of memory. One such suite of memories is how I used to be as a teenager and how I worshipped Kerouac. The discrepancy between Teen-Me and Nowish-Me is stark in many ways (and not in others, of course) and this starkness brings to mind the transient blabbitybla of everything for obvious, nothing-really-lasts-even-when-you-feel-so-strongly-that-it-will reasons. Fear (e.g., death-anxiety) and anger are related in ways that are easily extrapolated. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, and so on. Hence, I've found myself harshly reacting to my dead self and dead self’s heroes and modes of thought and so forth._____________________________________________________

This book covered all the bases of what makes art worthwhile and enjoyable for me:

-The Janus-faced creature of Cynicism-Irony-Humor/Sincere Thought and Confession gradually (though not slowly) arose from the ink and flashed me its hideously-beautiful mug in a clearer and clearer light as the pages faded behind the fixed position of my gaze.

-This book nails My Kind of Surrealism (I swear on all that is worth swearing on that this whorish linking was not premeditated, but it’s an undeniably useful tool—according to lazy and neurotic me—for keeping this review less digressive than it already is) rather well, despite being tagged as Bizarro Fiction, a term which calls to mind something juuuuust overreaching the target of my preferred style of surrealism. The unrealistic calm that our egg-bearing protagonist exudes at, say, shovel-bloodying and/or literal self-facing and/or time-traveling moments would make David Lynch cream his khakis and drool black coffee out of his slackened maw.

-It got me thinking about parenthood and all the things that we sapient warm-bloodeds place the deepest meaning upon in our lives. Parenthood—like acknowledgments of death's ubiquity—is also something that tugs at my brain more or less as a constant background hum at the very least, and the mystical and strained relationship between Man & Egg which Caris conjured up was able to bring these things to a heightened pitch, spiking up in bursts through the cognitive din-turned-white-noise. And though there is an implied sober seriousness of pondering The Nature of Parenthood and The Meaning of Reproduction/Life stuff that encroached, this was happily linked hand-in-hand to a perfusion of glorious dark-humor-induced giggles, silent and subjective, as well as breaking the mouth-world barrier and entering objectively verifiable LOL territory.

-Time Travel. Is anyone not a sucker for time travel? Tickled the fun/"serious" bone like a motherfucker. (Some weird TWSSiness there.)

-Thinking about my experience of The Egg Said Nothing also strongly calls to mind a series of feelings about romantic love that I’ve also described in another review. Goddammit. See, this is why I don’t write reviews that often. I only have so many thoughts and feelings. They get recycled. And I recycle through hyperlinks when I can. (What I wrote about Power's book in the second heading can be applied perfectly well to this aspect of my reading of Caris's bizarro tale.)

-I absolutely adored the use of giving away the salient plot points at the beginning of each chapter. Perfecto!

And here's where I run out of attempted-short-'n'-snappy-reviewing steam and just want to bluntly say that this book is FUN to read. FUN is the outermost concentric circle here, enclosing the above mentioned and whorishly/usefully linked/described points above.

Final Thought-Made-Pixels: There’s a scene which brought this personally time-honored image to mind like a slide show reflex, somehow both tightly encased and time-lapsed a'bloomin' within my skull:

And a book that does that while making me laugh aloud and feel anal-constricting terror and existential dread and ecstasy all simultaneously is worthy of praise, both of the fawning devotional sort and the digressive, roundabout sort that I’ve just displayed....more